


Ezekiel Jones and the bad day

by quizkwatsh



Series: Ezekiel Jones has OCD verse [1]
Category: The Librarians (TV 2014)
Genre: Gen, Hoarding, Kleptomania, Mental Health Issues, Mental Illness, OCD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-14
Updated: 2017-01-14
Packaged: 2018-09-17 11:11:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,721
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9320915
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quizkwatsh/pseuds/quizkwatsh
Summary: Ezekiel's obsessive compulsive disorder is acting up worse than usual and it is causing him to have a bad day.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is inspired by this post http://badsurvivor.tumblr.com/post/155377593975/likeaustralianotcrosby-heres-one-thought-i-had which suggest Ezekiel has OCD. The idea wouldn't leave me alone, hence why I wrote a fic about it.  
> If you think anything I wrote is offensive or inaccurate please let me know.  
> For specific trigger warning for this fic please check the end notes

Ezekiel Jones wakes up with a start. He can still remember watching them die over and over again. He gets up and goes to his kitchen to grab some water. It is just past five in the morning still too early to go to the annex for breakfast. 

He looks around his apartment and there are stacks of stolen goods everywhere. The stacks in his kitchen are everywhere, including inside his refrigerator and oven. There is no way he is able to prepare any food for breakfast here. He hasn’t been able to for months. He hates his apartment and this mess so much, but he cannot move out of the city because the annex is located here. And he has tried just moving to a different apartment in the past but that did not help at all. He still felt the anxiety of needing to make sure everything was still here. He has never been able to shake the fear that if he loses anything he has stolen, that he will end up with nothing again. That he will go back to having nothing and no friends like he had when he was a child. 

He knows it is stupid, and that he could just go steal more if he needed to, or even buy it he has the money now after all, but anytime he tries to throw something out, the anxiety gets so bad he feels like he cannot breathe. He has tried hiring cleaning people in the past to get rid of things for him, but that only resulted in several panic attacks and kicking them out before they even came close to cleaning his home. However that was a long time ago, and the problem has only gotten worse with time.  
How he lives now is the opposite of how he grew up. He knows both ways of living are horrible. All of this stuff stopped making him feel better years ago. Now all it does is fill him with dread and anxiety, but no matter how hard he tries he is unable to stop himself.

He should really organise his things. He knows he’ll feel better if he just has everything organised, so that keeping everything is actually useful again. Right now he wouldn’t even be able to find something if he needs it, which causes a lot of anxiety for him.

He will try to tackle his kitchen again, so he isn’t forced to eat take out every day. He has already tried this countless times and it never makes much of a difference.  
He starts with the stove. There are half a dozen pens, two wallets, a phone, some jewellery, two packs of tissues, an usb drive and some hair ties that he has stolen from people on top of it. And besides stolen things there are a bunch of old take out boxes, some cups, items used to prepare food and an old rice box. 

He needs a way to organise all of this. He needs separate boxes. One for pens, and then maybe he can keep hair ties and tissue packs together in a box. And Jewellery also needs a separate box. And he needs something large to store the old rice and take out boxes in. Maybe he can use those boxes for something else one day. He has an idea, maybe he can use the rice box for the pens. Yes that is a genius plan. Maybe he can put the valuable items such as the wallets and phone together. Or maybe storing electronical items together is better. He will leave that on the stove for now, he will decide later.

Now he just needs to find boxes to store everything. And he needs a place to the box with pens. Oh he knows just the place, how about if he places it near his desk that would make sense. Only there is no place on his desk. He will just put it on the floor near it for now. 

Now he just needs to find boxes for everything else. He knows he has some laying around here somewhere, if only he could remember where. He can always put them in boxes later, for now he can just put them in the right area. He can just leave the tissues and hair ties in the bathroom, and the rest in different corners of his living room.

Once he has done this his mind fills him with even more anxiety. This did not give him the relief he was hoping for. Today is one of the bad days, where his usual compulsions are not enough. He knows it is probably because of remember the video game loop, but knowing why it is happening does not make it any less frustrating. He hates these days where his mind is filled with constant pressure and he has to do everything in threes, because otherwise it will just keep on bothering him and he gets so scared that something horrible will happen.

He goes and puts all the things back on the exact right spot on the stove before moving them to their new locations again. And then he does it all again. Afterwards he gets ready and heads to the annex. Doing everything three times again, he doesn’t have to do this, but on days like this it just nags at him if he doesn’t. He cannot stop worrying about it until he goes back and does it. 

\---

The day continued being stressful and he had an increasingly difficult time understanding what the others were talking about, because he couldn’t stop going over every sentence three times and counting the words. And if the sentence was a bad length of words, he would try to change the sentence in his head until it had a good length of words.  
Suddenly he realised he was being addressed, “what do you think Ezekiel?” Eve asked him. Five numbers. A prime number bad. Changing the sentence. _What do you think about this? ___Six words. Two times three. He fixed it.

He tried to remember what they had been talking about, something about an Egyptian artefact and how to contain it. They were already looking at him because of how long he was taking to respond. “Yeah sure, got it, snatching the thing and then locking it up” he replied quickly. 

Okay twelve words. Four times three. Good. Everything was good. 

“Good to know you were paying no attention like usual” stone said, “someone remind me why this guy is even here” 

Ezekiel really does try to pay attention, but he just cannot stop thinking and worrying. 

He knows he’s being irrational but he can’t stop it. 

Eve is talking “Okay so we are going to go to Egypt and into the pyramid. And Ezekiel and Cassandra will go talk to the professor about how it can be contained.” Two sentences. 13 words and 16 words. 13 words. Really bad. Prime number. If he takes out the words _so_ the sentence is fixed. Good, he doesn’t have time for this he needs to focus on what the words mean. 

Someone says “Jenkins fire up the backdoor”. 5 words. Another prime number. Bad. _Can you fire up the backdoor?_ Six words. It is fixed again. 

___If he is going to be alone with Cassandra to go talk to someone, he really has to do a better job of pretending to be okay. He has to stop counting and just focus._ _ _

___Cassandra and Ezekiel walk in a large university, to go talk to the professor. Cassandra is talking about what they are going to say to the professor. “Okay, sure you can tell him whatever you want” Ezekiel replies. Nine words. Three times three. Good. Damnit he was going to stop counting, this was irrational, and no one would die if he didn’t count everything right._ _ _

___The walk from to the door to the professor’s office takes 46 seconds, they pass 7 students._ _ _

___The professor is eager to talk about the artefact, and theories that can be found in literature about how to contain it. Ezekiel lets Cassandra handle all of the talking and tries his best to ignore everything they are saying, while he looks around the office and steals three things. Two pens and a small figurine that was standing on display._ _ _

___\---_ _ _

___Cassandra and Ezekiel are in the annex researching the Egyptian artefact. Ezekiel is trying to read the books, but he cannot stop obsessing about the sentence lengths. He is so anxious that he cannot stop fidgeting and pacing around._ _ _

___Cassandra looks at him for a while before carefully asking “is something wrong? You seem upset.” Two sentences of 3 words. “what, no everything is completely all right of course.” 9 words. Cassandra looks as if she doesn’t believe a word of what he said, and she ends up saying “we are friends, you know you don’t have to lie to me right?” He tries to stop himself from counting, even though not doing so makes his skin crawl. She is looking at him as if she really cares, and a part of him wants to tell her, but he knows that if he tells her, she will never look at him the same way again. He can’t lose his friends, and that is what will happen if he tells them. He sighs and tells her “it is nothing. I just have a lot to do, do you think you can handle this without me? I have some things I need to take care of.” She seems surprised by his words, but smiles and nods at him. He rushes to leave after thanking her. He really is grateful to be getting out of here and instead be somewhere where he doesn’t have to worry so much about appearing normal on top of everything else._ _ _

___Ezekiel Jones left the library and the comfort he sometimes found around his friends, to go steal. Stealing was the first thing he ever got stuck on. Sometimes he thinks it is what started all these compulsions to do things. He knows that stealing will give him some relief from all of these thoughts that he can not stop. He knows that it will make his brain a bit more quiet._ _ _

**Author's Note:**

> Trigger warning: Ezekiel struggles with hoarding, counting (needing to do things three times, and needing to count amount of words in a sentence) and it is implied he struggles with kleptomania.
> 
> This is my first time writing and posting fic in several years, so any feedback would be appreciated. I am also thinking of making this into a series and writing more about Ezekiel having OCD, which would also involve people finding out about it, and supporting ezekiel. If anyone would be interested in reading that, then please let me know.  
> (also at some point the writing is a bit repetitive, but i did that on purpose to try to show how Ezekiel is thinking and getting a bit stuck on things)  
> and while depending on who you talk to, hoarding and kleptomania might not fall under ocd, they are all impulse control disorders and have some overlap. and I felt that for this fic it was more important to focus on the behaviours ezekiel struggles with, than making it seems like some textbook description.


End file.
